A popular trend among avid TV viewers is cord-cutting. It essentially means cutting out your cable-TV provider and instead paying for cheaper streaming video services.

But as Mark Niu reports, there’s a way to take cord-cutting even further, much to the surprise of a younger generation.

A TV advertisement from decades ago shows off what one might call the original TV hack.

A child asks, ”Wow, what’s this?”

A wise man responds, “It’s an old TV antenna. We used to call it rabbit ears. TV was free then.”

Some TV is still free today. And even though the National Association of Broadcasters found almost 30 percent of Americans had no idea free TV existed, some are finally starting to take notice.

The Consumer Technology Association estimates U.S. antenna sales will rise by 7 percent this year to nearly eight million units.

“Within this last year, I started getting a lot more customers asking me for antennas,” Patti Lopez, a Best Buy store supervisor said. “It’s getting a lot more popular and yes, it doesn’t really stay on the shelf very long anymore.”

Today’s antenna technology captures local TV stations, HD and 4K broadcasts, many up to 120 kilometers away from transmission towers.

And no need to fiddle with those long antennas any more – they now come in sleek and razor thin form factors.